Regularly is an android app to help you keep track of tasks that do not have a fixed schedule and remind you to do it.

Ghacks highlighted this really great Android to do based app call Regularly.

It solves a particularly unique use case that many people have.

1. People don’t like a difficult to do list like those Getting Things Done lists
2. People want to be reminded of a set of tasks that are “good to be carried out” but not those “if I don’t do my life will end”
3. They want a way to keep track of their habits and help them form them
4. Remind them to do it regularly

Regularly looks specifically for that purpose.

What are these kind of activities

You may or may not agree with them but here are some of the things that I can think of that will not kill but its good to push to do:

• Review your wealth plan. Update your net worth. Thinking of your families financial coverage
• Turn your bed to the other side.
• Update your resume
• Find out what is new in your industry
• Maintain your equipment
• Contact long haven’t met friends
• Have a meal outside with your family together
• Do nothing for 1 day
• Backup your data to a backup storage (Tablets, Smartphones, Online)

Android App

Regularly is FREE. You can download it here for your Android device. It is not for IOS or Windows Phone yet.

Habit tracking, reminding and forming

To be a productive person, it is important to remove deficient habits and build habits that will create extraordinary effects permeating all aspects of your life.

One of the way to do that is taking notes. Research have shown that those who take notes, build systems that helps them to successfully build or kick a habit.

Regularly helps that a lot because you can keep log of the intervals in which you carry out a good or bad habit:

• You want to build consistent streaks for good habits
• You need to be as less consistent about your bad habits as possible

Regularly lets you log down when each of those activity is carried out. This way you can be conscious about the regularity in which you carry out the event.

When you are conscious, change the way the reminders that bugs you to do the activity.

Fixed Period or Irregular

Specify whether the activity is regular or irregular. If it is irregular you will not see the “NEXT DUE”

But for people who wants to do something periodically, they can set a NEXT DUE whether its 1 day, 5 days, 3 weeks, 3 months.

Regularly will remind you from the last time you did the task. Many to do list can only set an interval but not from the last task completed date.

Bugging you to do the Activities

While building habits or destroying them requires you to

1. Make a pact with yourself that you want to do it
2. Be aware of Trigger-Routine-Reward

You can nudge yourself along the way, by varying the bugging system

Regularly allows you to vary the frequency in a percentage. By default its 33%.

Tag the Activity

In project management, we have Work Packages with specific objectives that have numerous Activities. This is similar to GTD’s Project and Tasks relationship.

You can tag these Activities in Regularly to Tags.

I have the following Tags:

• Wealth – Managing money to build net worth
• Hygiene – Activities for to be clean
• Equipment Maintenance – Things that will break down if you don’t do periodic maintenance e.g. Car, PC, Air Con
• Wellness – Go to dentist, Do a body checkup

You will have your own tags (do share with me!)

Backup your Regularly data

I really don’t think you need to sync it to an online store. As long as you can backup the data that will be good.

Regularly allows you to backup the data to your SD Card.

If not you can use Titanium Backup to backup the Regularly to your SD Card.

You can then use Regularly to set up an Activity to transfer your SD Card backup to your desktop!!

Some Activities I Keep Track of

Here are some things I keep track of. You can see how some stuff I have not done in a long time!

That can be clean the internals of the computer. Its not going to kill me but if my computer breaks down because I don’t do that I lose money.

I have a regular 3 month period to review my wealth plan.

I want to make it a point to meet my secondary school friends. So this will tell me when is the next time we should arrange something.

Also I want to build a habit to be more hygienic, such as cleaning my bed and chair instead of relying on my parents.

Conclusion

I think this app is so niche but can be so useful. The best is its free.

Let me know your experience with this application

What kind of activities would go into a use-case such as this?

Looks great. You can move it here and there as well.

When you click on the icon, you can reply back without leaving the app. Then tap back or empty space to continue doing what you are doing

Convenient Distraction

I am not sure how you guys find it but I am liking the idea of not going over to the conversation consistently but are informed via snippets about what my friends are talking about in the chat group.

Facebook Messenger > WhatsApp

Make no mistake I like Facebook Messenger and I really detest Whatsapp for its barbaric inability for you to chat with your friends using a full fledge keyboard at home.

Game Changer

Would this be a game changer? Honestly, I think WhatsApp is too big to be beaten this way.

It is so stupid yet better competitors like KakaoTalk, Line and Facebook Messenger are having a very hard time become close to it.

Here is a classic case of first mover.

I think Facebook Messenger is not the best but I like that most of the people I converse with are in Facebook.

For sure I think Line or some OTT messenger could be a better alternative than Whatsapp but friends have shown an unwillingness to switch to something better.

Wouldn’t you like to have a business like that? Your product is not good but people don’t leave you.

I review quite a fair bit of to do list applications and have gotten feedback from many friends. Some like it simple some like it detailed.

But i find that we are missing a CalDAV type To Do List framework that every developer can based it and create their own implementations.

In short here are some of the features that a flexible to do list application should have:

1. Task Description, Notes, Due Date, Status
2. Repeating or Recurring Tasks
3. Sub-tasking or parent child concept (preferably unlimited)
4. Tagging
5. Extensible API
6. Ubiquitous

What do you guys think?

Many readers have tried different kind of applications to take notes. The one use case to take notes is to jot down where the information enters your head.

That is when the information is the most fresh and you will not forget it.

Which is why it is usually on the smartphone nowadays.

With our usual contenders of Evernote, Springpad and Catch making revision after revision to out do each other, I find that what is really helpful have been the ability to make my notes more meaningful.

Create paragraph snippets

For bloggers that want to be productive during 2 1 hour commutes daily, you want to take notes close to the form where you can blog about it immediately after you get home with minimal reviews and edit.

The rich text format of Evernote is really helpful.

I would just need to make certain bold headers into real headers.

The best feature have been bullet or numbered list that can be indented. That is a functionality the rest of the applications cannot provide

Lists, lists, lists

Check lists and normal lists are great to list down things so that you don’t forget them, and creating a tree structure of list enables you to make them more readable.

I find that professionally, I list down a lot of

• steps we performed to achieve a certain objectives
• things to check for as best practices
• different functionalities and how they are divided amongst different vendors
• what are the pros and cons when comparing vendors

Meaningful notes are notes that I would want to keep for more than a year, and having bold headers and underlines segregates and emphasis notes accordingly.

Catch, Springpad for the matter was not able to do something like that.

This also shows what great programmers Evernote is able to bring in.

Now if only they are into doing to do lists.

What do you guys think? Is rich text media that important to you when taking notes?

I wasn’t the most avid reader growing up but somehow or rather it became a large part of my life. I do not know how it started but I guess the internet changed a lot of things.

There are just so much information to read daily and I enjoyed surfing the web so much.

I read a few topics but they generally revolve around money, soccer, technology and music.

But there is one problem with going from web page to web page.

You do not know when a good site have a new post.

So what happen? You have to go to 10 sites individually to see if there is a new article.

What if you found another good site? That makes it 11 sites to keep track of.

Isn’t there a better way to manage this?

Enter RSS feed. 

Each site syndicate their articles without all the snazzy distractions in a XML formatted stream. What happens is that you can put 10-100 of sites with the best information you like into one singular source and it will tell you how many new articles you have not explored.

Short to say, it becomes like a best news article Inbox.

You can arrange them via categories so that you can move from one interest area to another.

But where Google Reader actually come in is that, it has an API that is so widely extended that you can be ubiquitous in your reading.

It became so easy to read the best news that suits you everywhere. And you don’t have to re-read the articles again.

With the API various great third party readers such as GReader, Byline was developed.

People ask me why its a big deal. Only those that use it would know. We don’t surf the web.

Everyday we tune in to our reader. It tells us what is going on in the world. It tells us the changes in our interest are, if there are changes.

Essentially, the majority of the people like stuff like Flipboard and Zite. We don’t get something that doesn’t tell us if we have read it before.

So it is indeed a dark day that they decide to off Google Reader. How are you guys taking it? Start to find an alternative?

The path to frugality sometimes is about solving the most simple aspect of your life.

And what I learn is that majority of the greatest gains are resolve by making a decision to change your eating habits.

Realizing your Eating Habits

Many folks would like to be frugal and the decision to be frugal signals to yourself a desire to be more organized.

To be more organized to optimize your personal finance, you have to first asked yourself if you are bingeing on food a bit too much.

A lot of people don’t realize that they are eating more than they should.

• They like food in general
• They would rather run and exercise and NOT cut down on food
• They think that without that amount they will not have the energy
• They take more meals because they are bored
• They take more meals under certain trigger situations

I know because I have that problem as well. Your eating pattern is a habit form when you are young, mostly started from your parents.

If you eat the wrong stuff because your parents taught you the wrong stuff, you build nasty habit that cannot be easily changed.

You get overweight > you become unproductive > you don’t get enough energy for life > you become a low performer in life > your health care costs gets up > you fail your frugal living

So you can see how important overcome your bad eating habits.

Make redefining your eating habit a project

The first step is to acknowledge that you need to change this key habit. If you change this key habit, you will create a chain reaction.

Your life can get infinitely better.

First thing is to start being aware of what you eat, when you eat, how you are feeling when you eat the stuff.

It is also important to study if those food is really good for you or are you eating too much in quantity.

A lot of people are just not aware of what are good and not so good food.

Be aware.

Reduce your intake

Reducing your intake sounds very drastic, but actually its not. The same principles still rule

1. Eat the healthy food
2. Cut away the not so healthy food slowly ( don’t do it at one shot! You may not stay on the project if you do drastic cuts)
3. Take note of the energy you require and vary your intake accordingly

Follow a plan to cut down on your intake. There are many plans out there but the Lean Gains and similar diets are not bad.

And who says if you do that you will not have energy. These bodies are built by eating right and reducing in take.

You don’t get ripped by doing so much exercise but eat all the crappy food that comes your way.

You get ripped by watching how much you eat.

Brief summary of the differences that exist between the various forms of intermittent fasting.

If you’re unclear about what intermittent fasting is, read this.

• ADF (alternate day fasting, 36/12 hrs fast/feed). See also The Alternate-Day Diet, which is a milder form of ADF. While I don’t think The Alternate-Day Diet is an optimal approach for the fitness enthusiast, Johnson’s book is surprisingly good and scientifically accurate. Everything about the title (“turn on your skinny gene”) screams faddishness, but I was pleasantly surprised after finishing it. Having read all the quoted studies on ADF myself, I could not find any major misrepresentation of the findings apart from a few too optimistic blurbs about fasting and life extension. I can easily recommend this book for it’s summary of the ADF findings. And while the nutritional advice might not be cutting edge, it’s certainly not bad or misleading either.
• The Warrior Diet (20/4 hrs fast/feed). WD is actually not intermittent fasting in the strictest sense of the word, since the author allows small meals during the fast (vegetables, fruits). The WD book is somewhat of a cult classic, but the book prefers to quote stories and myth instead of scientifical evidence to supports it’s (sometimes ridiculous) claims.
• Eat Stop Eat (24 hrs fasting, 1-2x/week). You can read my review of Eat Stop Eat here. This is a book I highly recommend for those interested in fat loss and the physiology of fasting. Eat Stop Eat has a strong following with many success stories.
• The Fast-5 Diet. (19/5 hrs fast/feed). Fast-5 should be available for free on the Fast-5 website. I shouldn’t critique a book that is given a away freely. But let’s just say I don’t consider reading it the greatest investment of time you can make if you have the most basic understanding of how weight loss works.

• Leangains (16/8 hrs fast/feed)
  Within each of these systems, there are more or less specific guidelines regarding nutrition, ranging from the very vague (ADF) to the strict (Leangains). Leangains is specifically tailored to fitness and strength training, and for those wanting to get as lean and strong as possible. In comparison to other intermittent fasting based diets much more emphasis is put on proper pre- and post-workout nutrition. There are also specific guidelines with regards to calorie cycling, macrocomposition and meal timing.

LeanGains.com | Brief Summary of Popular Approaches to Intermittent Fasting | More here

Conclusion

Many people cannot get the desired results because firstly, they cannot overcome their habits built since 4 years old.

They cannot change their mindset and make a decision to cut down.

And they refuse to believe that diet matters a lot to both health and their desired energy levels and body shape.

They refuse to learn and keep giving themselves excuses that it doesn’t work.

Sometimes it just depends on whether you can step out of your habit zone and try.

If you optimize your intake, you will definitely have more energy and also optimize your financial situation

However it can become really big. Is there a way to clean this up?

You can run DISM.exe utility to clean this up.

In fact different version of Windows can run this:

1. Windows Server 2003: VSP1CLEAN.exe
2. Windows Server 2008: COMPCLN.exe
3. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2: DISM.exe

To do this:

1. Start your command prompt as Administrator
2. Type: dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

You will realise that this thing can run for some time, and when you monitor your hard disk space it actually goes down!

Do note that when you see the progress bar reach 100% its not over yet.

Only when its returned to the system32 directory is it completed.

I had only 7.61GB free and this frees up to 10.3GB, which is around 2.7 GB.

Do note that after you do this you cannot roll back to before you install the service pack.

Problem: You only have one handphone, but like Over the top messenger platforms such as  Facebook Messenger, you would like to check and send SMS from your tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

Your phone may be in your bag while you are working. You don’t want to consistently take it out.

Messages are faster input via a keyboard.

What if you left your phone accidentally at home? How do you check the messages?

Enter MightyText.

Mighty Text is the brain child of 2 Ex Google Guys. Basically they leverage on Android and Gmail platform to create what looks similar to iMessage and iCloud.

How it works is that your Android smartphone on 3G or 4G through your carrier sends and receive SMS.

Mighty Text runs a service that acts as a proxy server on your Android smartphone.

When a message is received by your carrier to your smartphone, Mighty Text forwards this to their servers, they then disseminates it to any devices registered using that Gmail account that you registered with that mobile smartphone.

That can be your Galaxy Tablet, your laptop with a Chrome or firefox browser or more Android devices.

On your smartphone

On your smartphone you will run this service which can be downloaded from Google Play.

On your desktop or laptop with a Chrome or Firefox browser

On your laptop or desktop, simply go over to https://mightytext.net/web/

It will ask you to authorize MightyText to register with that google account.

Once that is done you are hooked up! You can send and review messages from your desktop and laptop.

On your tablet or other Android devices connected via WIFI

Any android devices, that links to the same Gmail account which does not have a 3G connection, once installed with the MightyText service, can view and send messages.

This is on my Galaxy Tab Android Tablet.

Background information on the App and Startup

I find this interesting post at GigaOM that talks more in depth and the challenges faced

MightyText is billing the app as an iMessage for Android users, but in truth it has a far broader scope. iMessage only works between Apple devices and relies on a user’s Apple ID. MightyText relies on something far more universal: a mobile phone number. What’s more, it uses an Android user’s existing phone number, not an alternate one such as Google Voice. And since it accesses the SMS client on the device, messages aren’t sent through an unrecognizable proxy number.

Arora said MightyText has one beta customer that leaves his smartphone plugged in at home in the U.S. when he travels to India. He then text messages his friends and colleagues overseas from his laptop browser, incurring no roaming charges.

The interesting thing is that telecom operators can really promote this app to make SMS still relevant. It gives them one more reason to say their SMS is still viable.  Though I find its not really strong.

There will be many situational questions that tests you on what you should be doing FIRST, NEXT, or BEST.

And a frequently asked question are changes to project, what should you be doing.

1. Know the question. The question will give you lots of hints. Read the question according to the HABIT that I describe in my prep post:

When doing the sample questions, develop the following habit.

1. Do the questions 50 at a time within 1 hour. I didn’t have time to finish the exam. It will take time to understand the questions. If you don’t practice like this you will not develop a comfortable urgency.
2. Read the question once.
3. Evaluate all 4 options. Do not discount obvious wrongs.
4. Read the question again.
5. Ask yourself which process group and knowledge area you are at. This will help you eliminate some wrongs and tell you which is correct.
6. Ask yourself what is the question asking.
7. Do the calculation,or recall your ITTO
8. Eliminate the wrong answer
9. Pick the answer closest

2. In questions that talk about Changes to projects, almost all the answers look correct. What the question is testing you is which is the highest priority, lowest priority  thing you should do.

3. Know the decision script. Memorize this or download it from your brain during the 15 minute tutorial before your exam:

1. Clarify. The question may hint you your subordinates tell you or its hearsay. You need to be sure.
2. Dissuade. It is not good to always make changes unnecessarily
3. Assess the impact. Work with your team to understand its impact to current cost, scope and time.
4. Submit a change request
   1. Assess the impact (I know it’s a repeat but it is part of the change request evaluation)
   2. Look for alternative solution
   3. Decision (Done by the change control board)
5. Endorse Internally. Make the decision and update the sponsor. The sponsor and internal stake holders got a say
6. Update Customer. Ensure communication is clear. Formal Written communication can be applicable here.

4. The most important thing is know which process group and knowledge area you are at.

For that, you need to look at the hints.

If the question says that your sponsor have previously tell you that he will not agree to this, then we can just eliminate all the options and just skip to telling the customer.

If the question hints that you have already checked with your team that there is no impact, the next thing is probably to submit the change request

There are hints in the questions! Pick them up!

Conclusion

If you learn the habit of reading the questions and all the options and be vigilant, and the proper decision script these questions look pretty easy cause the correct answer will show itself.

To find out how I prepare for my exams and how it can help you, take a look here [My prep plan]

Is this useful? do provide me some feed back!